Today I stood at a window and watched as another storm rolled in from the west bringing snow to the mountains, rain to the desert and a little ray of hope to my heart.

   I was smartly dressed in my favorite Eskimo matron attire: Sheepskin boots, inch-thick sweatpants and a Polar Fleece pullover I gave my husband for Christmas, which is not only big enough to double as a cover for RV, but warm enough to withstand sub-zero conditions, lest I’m ever asked to lead an expedition to the South Pole.

   Somehow, I still felt cold. I’m sorry, but cold is cold.

   Three years ago, when we moved to Las Vegas, people joked that summers in Sin City would be hotter than Satan’s toenails. Nobody mentioned winters would be colder than the ice in his beer chest.

    I remember our first year here, the first time it snowed. It was barely an inch, but it covered the desert like icing on an apple cake, smoothed all the rocks, dusted the palm trees and even clung to the spines on the cactus. I’ve seen bigger snowfalls, but never one so incongruous and surprising.

   The second winter it snowed twice, a couple of inches each time, turning my husband’s usual 15-minute drive home from work into an hour-long demolition derby.

   No snow so far this winter. I suspect it’s as my mother used to say, too dang cold to snow.

   I know I shouldn’t complain, especially when other parts of the country are hip-deep in ice.

   Thinking about other parts of the country reminded me to call my brother in South Carolina to see how he was holding up. As usual, he took his time about answering the phone.

   “Hey, sister, it’s good to hear your voice!”

   “Good to hear yours, too,” I said. “How’s your weather?”

   Because Joe is blind, he can’t see what the weather looks like, so he likes to go out and check it first hand. Last night, when he started down the steps, tapping his cane side to side, his hand froze to the banister, he said, so he swung around and tapped right back inside.

   “It’s been bad here, sister,” he said, in a tone he reserves for big trouble, “bad, bad, bad!”

   How bad? They had to cancel church, of all things, a rarity in the Bible Belt, the kind of thing that only happens when hell freezes over, which, he added laughing, it probably had.

   “How’s the weather in Las Vegas of all places?” he asked.

   “Not as bad as yours,” I said, “but I am hungry for spring.”

   “I am, too,” he said. “I miss sitting out on the swing.”

   I pictured him in the lawn swing outside his apartment, where last summer I sat beside him pushing the swing with my toe while he smoked his pipe.

   “Spring will come soon,” I said, “I promise.”

   His voice brightened. “Oh, I know. It always does.” Then he added, “They’re calling for more snow this week.”

   “Stay warm,” I said, “and be careful on those icy steps.”

   We said our goodbyes and I went back to watching clouds.

   I wish you could have seen them. They rumbled over the mountains, pawing the air like a herd of wild horses, casting shadows, dappling the ridges with long fingers of light.

   Then the fingers closed and all went dark, except for one dazzling beacon shining on a valley like a spotlight, like a visible promise of spring.

   For a moment, I thought I saw a town in the valley, all lit up and glittering in the sun, in the midst of the gathering storm.

   Did the people in that town know how lucky they were? Did they remember to bask in the moment and give thanks?

   Or were they looking back across the desert at my house, asking the same about me?

   It was a good question. Too bad I didn’t have an answer.

   I was speaking about the importance of reading, what it has meant in my life. I told the story of how, after my first husband died, I spent a month alone on a lake and did a lot of reading. Reading, I said, had somehow helped me to heal.

   After the talk, a woman in the audience raised her hand.

   “What did you read after your husband died?” she asked.

   There is much I remember about that time in my life 12 years ago, and the things that helped get me through it _ family and friends and even strangers who bathed me in a thousand kindnesses.

   I remember the rhythmic drumming of rain. The weight of a cat that slept on my chest. The daily sea of condolence notes. The unspoken question in the voices of my children, “Mom, are you OK?”

   But for some reason, I don’t remember the books I read that month at the lake. They’re like so many people I’ve met over the years. I remember their stories, how they touched me, but I can’t recall their names.

    There is one exception. Near the end of that month, when I ran out of books, I drove into town to buy just one more.

   “Recommendations?” I said. The clerk smiled and handed me a novel about a grieving woman who was starting her life over _ as a detective.

    Alexander McCall Smith’s “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” was the first in a series. I didn’t just like it. I fell in love with its characters and the life they shared. To be with them was to be in a good place.

   I’m now reading “Teatime for the Traditionally Built,” the tenth book in that series. The next is due out this spring.

   Pursuant to my library talk, having failed to answer one question, I want to ask another: What have you read lately that helped you in some way or just put you in a good place?

   Here are my recent best reads:

1_ “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows; a friend gave me this for Christmas, and what a gift. In 1946, a London writer begins corresponding with members of a book club that was formed as a guise to shield them from arrest after their island was invaded by the Germans. Both a history lesson and a love story, I did not want it to end.

2_ “The Sweet By and By” by Todd Johnson; this was also a gift from a friend. It’s the hilarious and heartrending story of five Southern women whose lives intertwine in a nursing home. If I live long enough, I want Lorraine to be my nurse, April to handle my affairs, Margaret and Bernice as my bunkmates, and I surely hope Rhonda can do my hair. Also, if my life were a book, I’d want Todd Johnson to write it.

3_  “The Help” by Kathryn Stockett; recommended by yet another friend, it’s a fictional tale set in 1962 about a white Junior Leaguer in Jackson, Miss., who secretly interviews her friends’ black maids to write a book about their lives and their treatment by their employers. A story that could easily have been predictable shines instead with the clarity and grace of its characters. You won’t soon forget them.

4_ Finally, a book of poetry, “Telling Tales of Dusk,” by North Carolina native Terri Kirby Erickson. I carry this in my purse to pull out in airports or offices or any place a poem comes in handy. It never fails to deliver with lines like these: “Leaning on the counter by an open window with tomato juice dripping down your chin …you can’t help but think that eating a garden tomato sandwich in your own kitchen is finer than a café lunch in Paris.”

   Those are my answers. I’ll look forward to yours.

This will be a different kind of Christmas for me and mine, and for a lot us, really, maybe even for you and yours.

   Each year I tell my children not to overspend on gifts. Telling them is my tradition. Not listening to me is theirs.

   A month ago, when we got together for Thanksgiving, I tried telling them again. And this time I really meant it.

   Like so many families, we’ve seen our share of financial “challenges” this year. Jobs were lost. Hours were cut. Budgets were stretched. Belts were tightened. It made me proud to watch my children and their others learn to make do, and to make more of less.

   This time, when I said they shouldn’t overspend, they all agreed in theory. But they couldn’t quite agree in fact.

   For them, the best part of Christmas is not the getting, but the giving. They truly love to give each other gifts.

   When I suggested drawing names, you’d have thought I said, “Let’s hog-tie Santa and stab him in the gut!”

   Finally, I, and the economy, began to win them over and we agreed, at last, to draw names.

   The plan was simple: We would each buy one gift with a $25 limit. We might have to shop for days to find something at that price but, hallelujah, we would not go deeper in debt.

   I, of course, planned to cheat. I’m good at it. Drawing names was my idea, but if I wanted to get something for everybody, what were they going to do about it, stab me in the gut?

   Then a funny thing happened on the way to Christmas. My husband lost his job. He was laid off two weeks ago with dozens of his coworkers.

   We were planning to have a Christmas party. Instead, we had a “pink slip” party for everyone who’d been fired.

    As I stood in my kitchen watching a houseful of newly unemployed people say their goodbyes and wish each other well, it occurred to me that this would be a different kind of Christmas for all of us. We were all in that same leaky boat.

   A few days later my husband, God bless him, found another job. I wish I could say the same for everyone at that party. I can’t, of course. Not yet. And probably not any time soon.

   Statistics are only numbers until they have faces and names. It is one thing to know that unemployment in your state stands at 13 percent, it’s another thing entirely to know 35 people who just lost their jobs and could lose their health insurance and their homes.

    Today I spoke with my daughter-in-law, who would love to give Christmas presents to every soul on Earth, but can’t quite swing it this year.

    I wish you could have heard the excitement in her voice. Instead of buying gifts that she can’t afford, she has poured her heart into organizing drives for the needy, collecting blankets for the homeless and toys for children who might otherwise get nothing at all.

   I recall a Christmas in my childhood when my family hit hard times. Some people from our church brought us a ham and a box of groceries. I was so mortified I wanted to go hide under the porch with the dogs.

   After they left, my mother sliced the ham and said, “Life is a bank. Sometimes you put in, other times you take out, either way, it’s all the same bank.”

   Giving, she told me, is easy, taking is hard. “Remember how it feels,” she said, “because one day you will do the giving.”

   Whether blessed to give or blessed to take, all that matters, really, is that we do so with a sense of our abundance, and an open and grateful heart.

   And it will be a different kind of Christmas for us all.

Just when I thought my costume days were over, my husband came home recently with a big announcement.

   Some months ago, in what might be the world’s longest rehearsal, he started meeting once a week to “jam” with a group of guys who, much like him, temper their passion for music with the nagging sense that they are probably not ready to quit their day jobs.

    Which somehow brings to mind what my grandmother used to say about my granddad, a part-time Baptist preacher: “He works for the Lord when he can’t find a paying job.”>

   Preaching and playing music are not all that different.

   But back to the big announcement.

   One of the guys in the band is planning a Halloween party.

   And guess what? The “Not Really a Band” is going to play.

   “You’re invited, too,” he said.

   “Fine,” I said. “We never get any trick-or-treaters anyhow. No reason to stay home. I can eat the candy later.”

   He grinned the way he does when he knows he’s on thin ice and thinks being cute will help him skate. “Uh, there’s just one thing….”

   I gave him a look. “What?”

   “You have to go in costume.”

   “Excuse me?”

   “They said it’s not costume optional. You have to wear one or they won’t let you in.”

   I snorted Diet Coke out both sides of my nose. “And you believed them? Don’t you know that old trick? If somebody tells you’ve got to wear a costume, you can bet your last piece of Halloween candy that you’ll be the only fool in costume.”

   “Not if you go, too.”

   He is nothing if not persistent.

   I started to tell him that my grandmother rarely went to church with my granddad, and she never would’ve gone at all if she’d had to wear a costume.

   But he was playing his bass and couldn’t hear me. Again.

   He knows how I feel about Halloween costumes. It’s not that I don’t like them. I just don’t have any luck with them.

   Growing up, I always had to take my blind brother along trick-or-treating. For a costume, I would throw a sheet over his head. People would say, “What a cute little ghost!” And he’d get mad and yell, “I ain’t a ghost, I’m a mattress!”

   When my oldest child was 10, he went to a church party for which children were told to come as Bible characters and avoid anything “scary or gory.” I dressed him up as John the Baptist and let him carry his “head.” He was the hit of the party, but I nearly got excommunicated.

   And once, when I was old enough to have had better sense, I twisted my hair up in buns around my ears, sprayed them with an entire can of mega-hold hairspray and went to a party as Princess Leia from “Star Wars.” That was 1978. My hair has never recovered.

   I have no clue what to do for a costume for this party. If you have any suggestions _ provided, of course, they can be easily assembled from materials found around the home by a woman with little patience and no sewing skills whatsoever _ I would love to hear them.

   Meanwhile, I asked my husband if he has decided what his costume will be.

   “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to the party as a bass player.”

   Maybe I’ll wear a sign that says, “I’m with the band.”

   First loves are hard to forget.

   I was 7 the summer my grandmother took my hand to lead me out to her garden.

   I counted the steps from the porch to the yard. My legs were short. She had to stop on each step and wait for me, but she didn’t seem to mind.

   I remember the rustle of her starched skirt, the warmth of her hand and the sound of her humming a happy little tune.

   It wasn’t really a song, she said, just the music that played in her heart. She always hummed going to the garden.

   We took a shortcut through the basement, a place I feared. It was dark and damp, smelled of kerosene and mold, and it was filled with shadows where monsters lay in wait, hoping for a chance to eat me.

   I never mentioned monsters to my grandmother. She wasn’t scared of anything, not even snakes, and I wanted to be just like her. So I held my breath, prayed for God’s deliverance and walked a little faster. And the next thing I knew, we were stepping into sunshine.

   It was a lesson well learned. I’ve walked through a lot of scary basements. Sooner or later they always lead to light.

   The garden was planted in a patch of black earth and fenced with chicken wire to ward off rabbits and deer, creatures not easily warded off.

   I can close my eyes and see it still, my grandmother’s garden, a beautiful mess of leaves and stems, stalks and tendrils, caterpillars and earthworms, corn and beans, squash and okra, marigolds and morning glories all reaching for heaven like the Garden of Eden.

   On that perfect summer day, I picked my first ripe tomato.

   “There,” my grandmother said, pointing. “Take that one.”

   I took it. Plucked it off the vine and held in my hand.

   “Take a bite,” she said.

   I did. I bit into the skin, dirt and all, filled my mouth with its sweet, buttery flesh and let the juice trickle down my chin.

   I looked at my grandmother. We laughed and that was it. I’d never be the same. Once you’ve tasted tomatoes fresh off the vine there is no turning back.

   Then I grew up, left the South and lived a life with little time or space for gardening.

   I make no excuse. The truth is, some of us are gardeners, the rest of us just like to eat. I am of the latter.

   Every time I go into a grocery store, I miss my grandmother’s tomatoes. I also miss the ones my mother and stepfather grew in their garden, and the ones my sister grows in barrels on her back porch in South Carolina.

   My family and friends know how I feel about tomatoes. They use it to lure me to visit.

My sister called last week to tempt me. “My tomatoes are coming in,” she said. “Too bad you aren’t here to eat them.”Then Martha, her neighbor and my friend since second grade, e-mailed to say that her garden is “booming” too. She’s even making salsa with her crazy brother John.

 I know John, love him dearly. I wouldn’t go near his salsa. Martha added, “You need to come home for good tomatoes. Now my daughter is growing tomatoes on the foggy coast of California. “You should see them, Mom, they’re beautiful.”

Yes, I should. And would, if I could. I’d visit my daughter, my sister, my friend Martha _ and you, if you had a garden. We’d talk, laugh, eat tomatoes off the vine, let the juice trickle down our chins and have a really good time. But we would not touch John’s salsa.I’m hoping to go to the South this fall, maybe. Tomato season runs late some years. And corn might be ripe for picking…. Real monsters in life don’t eat people, they just gobble time.